Becky's photoblog

Williams College Museum of Art

In the past few days, we visited three museums that we’d never been to before, and we were pleasantly surprised to find that two of the three museums both have a copy of one of our favorite sculptures at the MFA! Turns out, there are a lot of copies of this sculpture and it was delightful to run in to two of them, two days in a row, in two different cities.

Just for fun, here’s a list of all of the versions of Randolph Rogers’ Nydia, the Blind Girl of Pompeii that I’ve seen so far:

• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA – 1856,  the MFA’s page on Nydia
• Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, NY – the Met’s page on Nydia
• Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ – Princeton’s page on Nydia
• New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT
• Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL – Art Institute’s page on Nydia

Nydia at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston:

Nydia at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: (photo taken in 2012)

Nydia at the Princeton University Art Museum (photos taken in 2016):

Nydia at the New Britain Museum of Art (photos taken in 2016):

Nydia at the Chicago Art Institute (photo taken in 2017):

Another magical evening at the Gardner Museum!

I finally got the chance to pop over to the Gardner Museum since they started allowing visitors to go inside the greenhouse, not just look in through the glass corridor. It was such a wonderful treat to smell the flowers and get right up close to see all of the beautiful details.

We spent the afternoon at the Peabody Essex Museum to see the exhibit Intersections, which brought us back to the Alhambra in Spain.

Photos from two weekends volunteering at the Gardner Museum

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I had a few minutes before meeting Brian in Copley Square, so I snapped a handful of photos of the lovely Old South Church. It was that perfect hour as it’s getting dark but the sky is still a deep dark blue, and I loved how the one stained-glass window above the door splashed flecks of colored light on the arches above the door. Yes, it’s an artificially lit stained glass window, but it was perfect.

We took Brian’s mom up to Salem to visit her old neighborhood, see the Peabody Essex Museum, and have a delicious lunch by the harbor!

The warm orange lights brighten the courtyard at the Gardner Museum as the sun sets around closing time (5pm) on the first day of daylight savings. If it has to get dark early, it might as well look like this:

I had a wonderful morning at the Gardner Museum attending a training session for the brand new gorgeous exhibit Ornament and Illusion: Carlo Crivelli of Venice, and I got to take some fun close-ups of beautiful details in the exhibit, and in the courtyard.

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After saying farewell to our lovely hotel room, we picked up our rental car and headed up to Mont Royal Park to enjoy the view of the city. We headed to St. Joseph’s Oratory right near the park because it was something I had read about. We had a long drive ahead of us, so I figured we would just swing by and see it, but it turned out to be a ginormous church at the top of a hill, with a really big parking lot – it looked like a pretty big deal, so we found parking and walked up lots of stairs … totally worth it. Really really beautiful.

Back in the car for one last necessity before hitting the road: fresh bagels. Mission accomplished, and we headed south but we didn’t get very far before we found out about a massive detour: the big bridge over the big river was closed, and our internet access was spotty at best. We thought we might have to swim across the St. Lawrence, but we managed to figure it out, and before long, we were at the border and on to the gorgeous green mountains of Vermont (that are actually rather blue).

Another necessary stop was the Ben and Jerry’s factory in upstate Vermont. Fun tour, delicious ice cream, homage to the flavor graveyard, and back on the road as the sun began to set. A few hours later, we finally saw the Boston skyline … home at last!